Last week the summer edition of Missouri State magazine was published online, which is the second issue presented on the new magazine site that was created earlier this year.

Last summer, members from the office of web and new media and office of publications attended a series of webinars hosted by Higher Ed Experts entitled Stop the Presses. In these webinars, the presenters all touched on how important it is to connect with your readership and to find ways to let them know when new issues or stories from your publication were available online.

Some of these best practices included enabling sharing via social media, posting story content on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and cross-promoting with other media featured in your online publication; for example, including a Flickr slideshow in a story, and then linking back to the story from the photo set on Flickr. We have employed all of these promotional methods on the magazine site, with varied success. This cross-promotion, linking, and social media sharing obviously brings more readers to the site, but the site visits have not been dramatically higher.

However, the communication method touched on most frequently during the webinars was to send a targeted e-newsletter or email marketing message when a new issue of the publication is available online. When the first issue of the magazine was published online earlier this year, we were not able to send out a focused email blast letting our readers know that it was available. A message was included in the Bear Bulletin, an email newsletter sent out to alumni, but it was one article out of many and not the sole focus of the email, and thus did not bring in a high number of visitors.

With this most recent edition, the Alumni Association sent out a targeted email to the Missouri State community, letting them know that the summer issue was now online. Here is a screenshot of the email marketing message:

This single targeted email worked great, and we saw a very sharp rise in our site visits. On the day the email message was sent out, we received 1/3 of our total visits for the month of June. You can see in the chart below the day the email was sent out and the corresponding spike was on that day, and how it fell the following days, even though there were still many more visitors than normal:

In addition to this email, we are using other push methods such as subscribing to the RSS feed of the magazine, and continuing to have a short message within each Bear Bulletin that is sent out to alumni. While these methods, along with sharing and promoting content on social media sites, does work and brings in extra visitors, focusing on a single email marketing message obviously has its advantages and is the best single method to pull in readers and have them view your newly published content online.